The Drift Wars (18 page)

There
was something else to that event, something that didn’t come to
the surface until several days later, during a routine spectral
analysis of the video. The gas coming out of the ship was rich in
oxygen.

Even
though the Riel didn’t breathe, their ships were still pressurized
to provide a medium for sound and heat. Because the air’s
composition didn’t matter, they generally avoided combustible
gases like oxygen. So why was this one different? Further analysis
determined that the air inside the cruisership was a near-match for
their own.

The
men voiced any number of theories but always came back to one: that
whatever was on board that ship, it breathed just as humans do. And
that meant they had just discovered the third race.

—   —   —

The
technical challenge of gathering the combat suits was nothing
compared to the emotional one.

The
bodies hadn’t strayed far, having the same momentum as the ship
itself, and in the vacuum of space a feather falls as fast as a
cannonball. Peter had no fuel for his rocket pack, so he tethered
himself to the ship with a long rope, leaped out, grabbed a body,
then pulled himself back in. Soon he was getting one on every try,
but it never got easier to manhandle his dead comrades—to rip them
from their peaceful orbit only to strip them for spare parts.

Peter
had seen plenty of death, but nothing this depressing. Corpses piled
up in the main cabin—he had to keep them on board to know which he
had collected—and the ship had become a mortuary.

The
quiet was too much. Peter began to regularly talk aloud. To himself
at first but later to Linda.

He
walked her through his work, but that grew boring. So he told her
stories from his life on Genesia—stories, he realized, that she
already knew. She had read his memory scan. She knew him better than
anyone.

—   —   —

The
navy held at the edge of the solar system for hours, until they were
certain the Riel cruisership was out of sensor range. Then they
aimed for the outermost planet in the system—a rock so small and
cold that it could barely be called a planet.

The
location was ideal. The Riel homeworld was only five planets away,
and in near-perfect orbital alignment. The planetoid didn’t
rotate, so they parked the ship in the cover of the dark side and
gave the pilots a turn at being bored.

The
marines hauled the equipment into position by rocket pack, the low
gravity making everything practically weightless. Their biggest
challenge was to keep their speed down, lest they shoot off into
space. The men were cheerful, happy to be free of the cramped ship.

Peter
worked with several others to install a catadioptric telescope. They
wouldn’t be able to see much, just the main cities, but they could
monitor the traffic to and from the planet, which would hint at
where the spaceports were—important details when planning an
attack.

Once
the telescope was in place, Peter volunteered to monitor it alone,
and the others were happy to leave it to him. They hauled out a
week’s worth of supplies and left him to set up camp. Peter
patched into the telescope and spent days watching the homeworld’s
lazy spin.

The
homeworld was backlit by the sun—so beyond a crescent of light
along the right edge, it was cloaked in perpetual night. Several
large landmasses floated on even larger oceans, with two sizable
deserts in the middle and a white frost at the poles. There were a
few dozen cities, which lit up as they rolled into the twilight and
winked out as they passed deeper into the night. Somewhere just
beyond Peter’s sight, their sun would again rise. He tried to
envision what that might look like.

The
images he pictured came from his own memories: the forests and
rivers of Genesia, and the pungent, fertile smell of farmland. The
third race, he decided, was much like his own—warm-blooded,
planet-dwelling folks. They probably weren’t Riel at all, not as
Peter knew them, but some other race entirely that was aligned with
the Riel.

His
thoughts eventually fell on Amber. Their life together was a shallow
memory. While he could still describe what she looked like, he could
no longer call up her image in his mind.

Was
she still sending letters?
He
hadn’t checked his mail in months.
More
important
, he thought,
who
was she sending them to?

Certainly
not him. He knew that now. It hadn’t been him on that ride to the
spaceport, and her special good-bye belonged to someone else.

It
doesn’t matter
, he decided.
I’ve haven’t lost anything; her love was never mine.

It
was time to let go, to put aside those borrowed feelings and make
room for his own.

—   —   —

Peter
used every fiber of muscle, his own and his suit’s, to pull the
cable taut. He hooked the looped end around an L-shaped door handle
and released it gently, making sure it held. Then he pulled himself
across the main cabin to where the cable joined with a spring that
was welded to the opposite wall. Everything looked good.

He
walked to the dark corner where the bodies were piled. Only a few
dozen left, he assured himself, lifting the top one. “J.
Barberis” was stenciled in white on its
back. The suit rattled as he moved it, and he peered into the visor;
the body had frozen and shattered, its remains floating inside like
frosted rubies.

“You’re
next, brother,” Peter said, thinking back to the man this had once
been.

He
hooked the suit’s arms over the cable, aiming it at the hole in
the ship’s side. Then he pulled up the standard funeral service
onto his visor and read:

God
of unceasing change,

We
are always unfinished,

And
you are not through with us yet.

Peter
had cleared the ship of anything that could be unbolted to lighten
the load for the journey, but he’d put off the corpses until the
end. Rather than just tossing them out, he rigged up a catapult to
make sure they went far from sight. They had been piled inside for
three weeks now, and he never wanted to see them again.

As
for the funeral service, partly it was to pass the time—charging
the batteries with just the one solar panel was a slow process. But,
more than that, the ceremony differentiated these men from the rest
of the garbage he had to clear out.

We
journey to the other side,

To
find your warm embrace,

Peter
had recovered ninety-two suits, all but three, which should have
been twelve more than he needed, but he had to check the batteries
for damage. Each suit contained six, distributed in the arms, legs,
and torso. That balanced out the weight but, unfortunately, also
increased the odds that one had been hit during the attack. So far,
one in five wouldn’t hold a charge and, unless that ratio
improved, he would come up short. According to the manual, being
even one short was too few.

But
while the spirit passes,

The
body remains.

And
with it, the memories of family and brothers.

Peter
had stripped the first few suits of anything that might be useful,
but the one thing that he really needed to replace—the heating
coil in his suit—was built into the ceramic casing. It would be
impossible to switch suits without an airtight room; he would freeze
solid before he had even undressed.

The
short in his heating coils had grown worse. His batteries barely
lasted an hour now, and plugging them into the charger meant
delaying the rest.

And
so, my brother,

I
send you on to greener pastures,

And
stay behind

To
guard all that you loved.

He
closed the service and grabbed the L-shaped door handle. He turned
one side, freeing the wire loop from the other. The spring recoiled,
whipping the cable forward and launching the body into space. He
watched it fly away, catching glints of sunlight as it spun into the
distance.

It
was strange to hold funerals for men who might be alive and well
back on the base, with no memory of their own death. But Peter felt
it was important. He had served with these men for three months.
Their bodies could be replaced, but their memories were dead
forever.

Honoring
their remains showed that each life had value, that their bodies
weren’t just empty shells to be used and replaced. And if their
lives mattered, then maybe Peter’s did too. All he wanted was for
this struggle to mean something, that it was more than just bringing
intel to Command. He wanted to believe that someone back there was
waiting for him. That someone would be glad to see him.

It
didn’t seem like too much to ask.

—   —   —

Peter
returned from his outpost at the telescope to find the ship buzzing
with news. The men had managed to tune in to the homeworld’s video
transmissions, picking up their news and entertainment and giving
them their first look at the third race.

Sergeant
Craft met Peter at the door and led him straight to the monitor. The
others had already seen it, but they gathered around to see Peter’s
reaction. At first Peter took it for a joke: the third race didn’t
just resemble humans, they
were
humans. At least they looked exactly the same.

“How
could they…?” he started, not sure of what to say next.

“We
first saw this three days ago,” Craft said. “So we’ve already
asked every question you could think of. It’s answers we don’t
have.”

—   —   —

Peter
hurled the soldering iron across the empty cabin and howled in
frustration. He pumped his stiff hand and stared at the mass of
wires and solder that had been his sole occupation for the last nine
days. It was a molten mess; Peter had no idea what he was doing.

The
suit batteries were complicated. They had chips inside to regulate
the power, and unless he wired everything correctly, he got nothing.
The manual had instructions, but they read like pure gibberish. The
suit had given Peter a course in basic electronics, teaching him to
strip and solder wires, but the electrical diagrams, intricate maps
of lines and symbols, were beyond him. He used the pictures as a
rough guide and hoped for the best.

The
lead wires, those that actually carried the power, had to be wired
in sequence, while the auxiliary wires, which controlled the chips,
had to be run in parallel. Some wires led directly to the engine,
while others were connected to the other batteries. Peter labeled
each wire with tape, but by now there were hundreds of them,
crossing and re-crossing each other. The chaos was overwhelming.

He
gently laced the two power leads out from the spaghetti and wired
them to one of the remaining batteries. There were sixteen left,
which was still five shy of what he needed to fire the engine. He
knew this for sure; he counted them daily. That left one option: to
use the batteries from his own suit. He didn’t know exactly how
that was going to work, since he also needed those batteries for his
life support, but he’d figure it out when the time came.

Peter
twisted the leads onto the pigtails that he had already soldered on
the battery, then did the same with the six auxiliary wires. He
wrapped each of the connections with black tape to keep them from
shorting and stacked the battery with the others in a metal box. He
started to count the batteries but gave up with a sigh.

He
walked across the room and retrieved the soldering iron.

—   —   —

The
videos of the third race sparked a heated debate among the marines.
Some felt the discovery so important that they should return
immediately to report it. Others insisted that they should wait
until the survey was complete. The latter group won, arguing that
knowing what your enemy looked like wasn’t nearly as important as
knowing how to kill them. The team stayed another two weeks.

A
small fleet of warships was waiting at the edge of the solar system.
The ships were sleek, ceramic-hulled, and unlike any Peter had seen
before. Peter’s ship tried to run, but the Riel blocked them with
lazy ease. A single ship closed to engage. The battle was short and
decisive. Peter alone survived.

This
he owed to luck. When the first missile exploded, it drove a cabinet
at him, pinning him to the wall. By the time Peter worked himself
free, the battle was lost and everyone dead. He remained hidden for
as long as he could, hoping the Riel would leave before his oxygen
ran out.

—   —   —

Peter
flipped the six batteries out of the charger, then, in three fluid
movements, switched them with the batteries in his legs, arms, and
chest, which he then slapped into the charger. The exchange had
taken only eight seconds; after days of practice, that was as fast
as he could go.

His
goal was to bring both sets of batteries as close to full as
possible, but his heating coils had degraded such that they would
suck his batteries dry in only a few minutes.

He
was gaining time with each flip-flop, but the margins were tight.
When he started this an hour earlier, his empty battery took five
minutes to charge. Now, nearly full, it was going to take only
forty-five seconds. Soon he would find out if this entire gamble was
going to pay off.
Not a gamble
,
he corrected himself.
It wasn’t
gambling if you had nothing to lose.

The
charger’s timer fell to single digits, and Peter placed his hands
on the batteries. It hit zero, and he flipped the batteries out,
again switching them with the ones in his suit. The charger clicked
back on, counting down from thirty seconds.

Peter
had planned to do this yesterday but had procrastinated, wasting
time trying to pull power directly off the solar panel with the hope
of keeping the batteries inside his suit. The experiment had been a
disaster: something inside the panel fizzled and, for one
heart-stopping moment, Peter thought he had ruined everything.
Fortunately, the charger still worked. He decided to stick to the
original plan.